By Cindy Forster
One hundred blockades around Bolivia mounted by the Indigenous —in a nation where they are the majority— are demanding a return to the communal socialism practiced during the years of Evo Morales, 2006 to 2019. Donald Trump’s aggressive support of President Rodrigo Paz ignores credible accusations of drug trafficking that involve Paz, who was inaugurated in November of last year. Paz’s father, a neoliberal president in the twentieth century, had his visa revoked by the United States for his association with the narcotics trade. Juan González of Democracy Now commented the other day that, right now in Bolivia, peaceful blockades that demand the resignation of hard-right president Rodrigo Paz constitute the largest popular protests unfolding anywhere in the world.
In Latin America, Donald Trump is threatening ‘to send a missile into the living room’ of any president who resists him, on the argument he is eliminating drug traffickers or stamping out socialism. Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz has been ruling by decree under the tutelage of Washington since he came to power on November 8th. In early March, Paz was in Florida with one-third of Latin America’s presidents celebrating Trump’s grand scheme to bring the hemisphere back into subservience to the United States. Now, the entire countryside is asking Paz to step down. The urban regions are swayed by a venal and hard-right media. Should Paz resign, the Constitution dictates that new elections be held in ninety days.
The 22nd of March, Paz’s party suffered stunning losses in local elections for governors, local-level assemblies, and mayors. Paz managed to proscribe leftist candidates illegally. The corrupted judiciary did so (not clear what they did—proscribe candidates?) up to the very last minute. The executive imposed the same strategy (not clear—what strategy?) on their rightwing rivals. Of some 335 municipalities, Paz’s party only won 39. Numerous leftist candidates were excluded via lawfare. Others disguised themselves in alternative parties and slipped through the dirty politicking of the right. Even with 97% of the vote counted for and with the victory of leftist cocalero leader Leonardo Loza for governor of Cochabamba, the unwarranted elimination of votes continued. Loza’s first-round lead is officially recorded as more than two percent. The director of Radio Kawsachun Coca, Ramiro Garcia, contends that more than eight percent of the Cochabamba vote has been stolen from Loza and that he won by 50%. Cochabamba journalist Nelson Colque says that Loza likely won by 60% and perhaps as much as 67%.
Loza had won by the “forty-percent rule” and held a sixteen-percent lead over his nearest rival, though a candidate’s victory only requires a ten percent lead. The public has a right to watch the vote-counting, but the public was banned from that process. For more than one hundred hours, poor people who are leftists held a peaceful vigil outside the hotel where votes were tallied. The sponsors of the rightwing contender in the governor’s race mobilized the notorious “motoqueros,” the Cochabamba paramilitaries who raped and killed through the coup year of Jeanine Áñez, from 2019 to 2020. The motoqueros decided to leave, seeing the size of the mobilization in support of Loza.
Drug busts and corruption tied to the right
On Paz’s watch, a number of police operations have discovered criminal substances used to process narcotics, as well as actual drugs, concealed in wood flooring shipments and wooden containers crossing between Bolivia and Chile and heading for Europe. The government did not pay much notice. The shipments originated in the lowland metropolis of Santa Cruz where Paz’s closest allies concentrate — magnates of agro-industry and the nation’s financial sector.
Santa Cruz elites are proud of their generational, serious fascism, that is often Croatian-inflected and sometimes Hungarian. Like President Paz, they are dead set on burying any memory of equality and on privatizing everything in their reach. The twentieth-century state, before and during neoliberalism, was run in connivance with the drug lords. That era seems to have returned.
Santa Cruz is at the center of shifting stories told on what might have been inside 32 suitcases brought illegally from the United States on an expired diplomatic passport by a rightwing politician. The operation involved a private jet, a modality that had allegedly occurred a number of times before. The suitcases vanished from Santa Cruz’s Viru Viru airport, though the Bolivian woman using the diplomatic passport after her political term expired was taken into preventive custody. A member of the judicial branch is also under investigation.
In another case, supposedly defective money spilled over the working-class city of El Alto when an airplane crashed to the earth, killing tens of passengers. It was the dark of night. The accident on the icy runway revealed a flight-plan of four similar trips noted for the Hercules aircraft. That plane is the property of the military, and its trips must be approved by the president. The money was burned at the scene of the crash in the middle of the ambulances, but not all of it, as crowds appeared to scavenge the wreckage for bills. The serial code “B” on the currency billowing at the crash scene was banned, rendering illegal the “B” series of bills that people had in their possession across the country long before the crash occurred.
Most Bolivians struggle with poverty that has worsened dramatically. Many are reduced to eating one meal a day. In the cities, people scavenge food at neighborhood trash dumpsters. More than one recent case has surfaced of single women first killing their small children and then themselves to end their hunger. They experienced a time of economic dignity before the coup d’etat of 2019 that ousted Evo Morales, an anti-imperialist and Indigenous president. Politically, “Evo” was born of social movements that decided it was imperative to win political power. They created one of the most egalitarian economies in the hemisphere.
Narcotics agents recently confiscated a number of hashish shipments, some from the United States, called liquid marijuana in the translation to Spanish. Hashish is a new commodity in Bolivia. Analysts conjecture this marks the birth of yet another narcotics sector based in the rightwing stronghold of Santa Cruz.
One of Latin America’s most dangerous drug lords, Uruguayan Sebastián Marset, was captured in a sting in mid-March. He was in his luxury accommodations in the city of Santa Cruz. It is a place he has often lived, while rightwing authorities have loudly denied his presence in the country. Marset was immediately flown to the United States and denied bail while awaiting trial.
Invented narcos
Evo Morales is one of the most prescient analysts in Latin America. He is the leader trusted by the poor, judging from the impressive numbers in the marches he convenes (almost one-quarter of the population in the last march he led), enormous congresses and assemblies (ranging from five thousand delegates to 50,000 members in attendance in the last few years), and a null and blank vote that protested his exclusion from the ballot and received 22.3% in the national elections as compared to 24.8% for Rodrigo Paz. Evo reminds us, “We have closed the [U.S.] military base. We have nationalized. They do not forgive us because the Indians have nationalized. We defeated all the programs of the gringos here.” Morales expelled the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), the notoriously repressive anti-narcotics police whose presence is now prohibited by the Bolivian Constitution. He declared persona non grata “the [U.S.] ambassador to Bolivia because he was financing the attempted coup d’état in 2008.”
Morales said on January 4th, one day after the kidnapping of Venezuela’s president on specious drug-trafficking charges: “The government of Lucho [President Arce, 2020-2025], in the second year of his administration, [was] involved in drug trafficking. I personally took documents to Lucho, and talked to him one-on-one, in 2021: ‘Look at this information that was given to me,’ I said to him. And nothing, nothing, nothing [was his answer]. The second time, I didn’t bother going to Lucho. I publicly denounced it with audio recordings. And delivered those recordings [with] a legal document to the Public Prosecutor’s Office. That’s where my responsibility ends.” These words are not proof of Arce’s personal gain from narcotrafficking, but they are clearly a testament to his unwillingness to halt it.
One year of dictatorship under the coup president Jeanine Áñez could not find any evidence to pin drug charges on Morales, despite a phalanx of lawyers assigned to the task. Neither could President Arce dig up proof after five years of legal investigations dedicated to producing a reason to arrest Morales, to silence his most astute critic.
The current government continues to accuse ex-president Evo of being a “narco” on specious grounds. There is widespread outrage over false narcotrafficking allegations against him. Twice, Morales has been absolved of charges of sex with a minor because no victim accused him. On October 27th, 2024, Morales suffered an attempt to assassinate him in a high-speed car chase that lasted about half an hour. The filmed evidence includes fourteen bullet holes and the blood shed by one of the two drivers when a bullet grazed his head. While overwhelming, that proof has largely been ignored. It was a chase with the clear possibility of death for the two drivers, Evo, and his assistant — for everyone being pursued. In addition to a helicopter overhead, the vehicles emerged from a military base, and the assailants were flown out in a military helicopter. These are all actions that required President Luis Arce’s approval.
This year, police have intimidated thousands of people with a helicopter overflying the place where Evo has been protected ever since the assassination attempt, in the complex that houses the “Kawsachun Coca” radio station in Lauca Ñ. He is surrounded by rings of thousands of Quechua peasants who will give their lives to defend him. Above their heads, government drones are constant. Morales’ serenity is remarkable, even now when Trump has escalated his threats to seize the Indigenous ex-president.
President Paz has promised the arrival of DEA military personnel, then denied the same. Rumors abound. The apparent plan is to deploy the DEA in Cochabamba, the center of leftist organizing in Bolivia. In defiance of the Constitution, there are already foreign soldiers in the heart of the region known as El Trópico, and those soldiers are protected by police, say leaders of the Six Federations of coca growers. El Trópico at this point is a major exporter of fruit.
The larger context is sobering. Following months of the build-up of an enormous U.S. military presence in the Caribbean, unilateral U.S. attacks on motorboats killing over two hundred people, and accusations that Venezuela’s president was a drug kingpin, Trump announced immediately after the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro that the abduction had nothing to do with narcotrafficking. He said it had everything to do with Venezuela’s oil, the largest deposits on earth. Trump’s determination to destroy anything that resembles socialism is notorious. US forces invading Caracas in January employed devastating new weaponry that makes it possible to assassinate anyone on earth, it seems.
Bolivians are determined, not fearful. One Indigenous blockader said to a news reporter on June 7th that he was reminded of the Water War in Cochabamba, when the mobilizations were constant against foreign transnationals. Women in El Trópico, where coca is now grown for legal uses under community supervision, remember the 1990s that were marked by massacres, foreign soldiers and rapes of women of all ages by elite troops and DEA agents. Evo chose to share detailed histories with U.S. Black and Latinx youth –I joined the youth to guide them– when we visited the cocalero region in late May to express our solidarity.
In the days of our visit, a Hercules aircraft from the United States was reported to have landed in the lowland rightwing region of Santa Cruz, carrying U.S. personnel, bullets and tear gas. Rodrigo Paz’s attack on the blockades is publicly assisted by Argentina and other conservative South American presidencies. While we were visiting, the lights went out in the entire Trópico, an occurrence that cannot be explained by equipment failure or natural accident. This week, the electricity has been systematically going out and internet has been cut, which is evidently a measure of psychological warfare. At this point in 2026, it can only be hoped that the U.S. public will act quickly.
